


Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Duel Academy - After the Credits

by Anti_Mattering



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! GX
Genre: Existential Angst, Gen, Heavy Angst, protagonist is the self-insert of that game, set after the old GX Duel Academy game
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-22
Updated: 2020-10-22
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:15:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27142321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anti_Mattering/pseuds/Anti_Mattering
Summary: Sometimes a game needs an ending.
Kudos: 2





	Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Duel Academy - After the Credits

How many years has it been?

How many years since he entered Duel Academy? How many years since he first went to class? How many years since he became King of Games?

Who could say at this point? Every day just blended together now. The same classes, same events, same people, all playing out in the same routine over and over again.

It had to have been at least a decade now. A full ten years of attending a three-year boarding school. And in all that time, he'd never even left the island. Never seen his parents, though they continued to send him money each month as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

On second thought, it had to be more than a decade. He'd changed his name more than ten times now. For whatever bizarre reason, the school chancellor was given the authority to do that. For a time, it had been a yearly ritual. Try to reinvent yourself, he'd say. "You might be stuck here, but that doesn't mean you're stuck as yourself!"

Did that ever backfire. Who even was he at this point? He'd done so many things and been so many people that he had no idea anymore. Just a mess of half-remembered personas and inconsistent actions all crashing together, and all without any reaction from the people around him.

He called them people, but that was generous. They might seem human at first, but they weren't. They clearly weren't. They'd all been trapped here the same as him, yet none of them even so much as mentioned it. They all still talked as if they were working towards a future and towards graduation, yet the fact that the same year would repeat itself after the calendar switched over was just never a consideration.

They didn't even seem to listen when he spoke. Only a select few words or phrases seemed to get through to them, awakening the same few stock reactions. The same comments about his exam performance, the same about him staying in his room all weekend, the same for buying cards at the shop. It was all the same again and again.

How did he get here? Did he ever even apply to this school? How long ago did he first set foot on the island? He couldn't remember. Definitely more than ten years ago. He'd remember if it was that recent. And he hadn't changed a bit since that day.

Physically, at least. Still the same teenager as day one on the outside. Inside, though, he wasn't even sure he was human anymore. It was like this vile place had corrupted him, making him more and more like one of the others here. Just a prop to play out his role.

In all this time, he'd never found a way to resist. He tried, of course. By God did he try. He did everything he could possibly think of to get a reaction from the others. There was a solid period where he'd become the top student in the entire school, then one where he was the absolute worst. He'd tried slacking off, then being studious. He tried hanging out in the schoolyard with friends, then isolating himself from everything.

Picking fights, tearing up cards, attacking people, drowning himself in the ocean, jumping into the volcano. Anything he could possibly try to make a change, he'd already done. And every morning, he'd just wake up back in his dorm room ready to head to class.

What could he do now? Could he even give in and accept this fate? How would he do that? He was already fulfilling his role as a student. He couldn't do anything else. So what did this place want from him?

That was presumptuous. He had no way of knowing whether this place wanted anything, let alone from him. Was anyone in control here? Anything? He couldn't tell.

There was exactly one instance where he thought something may have changed. It was with the one called Jaden. He never liked Jaden. Always so annoying and pushy despite being one of the easiest people to beat. And the constant yelling, too.

For a brief time, though, that all had changed. All because of a single instance in the middle of one of their games. For just a moment as he was preparing to play a card, he could have sworn he heard him say something he'd never heard before. Some with an "N" sound. New? Necro? Neos? Nerve?

Whatever it was, it wasn't normal. Jaden had recovered in an instant and moved on to his same routine plays. All attempts to get him to repeat it or to ask about it didn't work (he wouldn't respond to direct questions, same as the rest). He knew it happened, though. It had to have happened.

For what had to have been three years after that, he'd obsessively stalk Jaden around the island. He did everything he could think of to fully exhaust every possible interaction the two of them had together. Even when there was clearly nothing left to see with him, he still persisted. All in the hope he could get that same mistake to repeat itself.

But it never did. Now he was left to wonder whether it had happened at all. It wasn't out of the question for him to have hallucinated it. Maybe it was an invented memory born out of his desperation. He said he could remember it clearly, but what did that matter? He couldn't even remember who his parents were after all this time.

How long had passed since he first started recollecting all of this? It could have been as little as a few minutes to as long as years. Time meant nothing to him anymore. Everything was just a blur now. He'd tried so hard to die, but when that didn't work, he tried to stop thinking. That didn't work either, though.

That left him with no options. He could only move from place to place as directed by the calendar, the spaces in between being an unnatural filler where things certainly happened – he knew in some objective sense that things had happened in these spans of time – but he couldn't possibly tell what they were. If he wasn't talking to another person, going to the classroom, or deciding where he was supposed to go next, it was all just a buzz of meaningless information that sped by him like cars on a freeway.

He thought maybe he could find some way to use those spaces, but that plan was abandoned long ago. There was really, truly nothing he could do to change his fate. He was stuck here forever. A life of never-ending card games and tests at Duel Academy.

Somehow, he knew that's exactly what Jaden would have wanted.

**Author's Note:**

> Something I had the idea for a while ago but didn't decide to actually write until I recently remembered it. Spooky times.
> 
> The premise is basically founded on my realization that this game doesn't actually end. Like, there's a win state insofar as you work to being King of Games. But when you do that, the credits roll, then a new week starts up. You just keep going. And that isn't super unique for a game of this nature except for the fact that you're literally going to a high school.
> 
> So what we end up with is a situation where, after beating the game, you just continue to go about your life day after day in the same repeated events. You'll never graduate or go beyond your first year or do anything but the things you already did so many times before. And the only escape for it is to just turn off the game or wipe the save, but how do you do that if you're a character in the game itself? That's legitimately creepy to me.
> 
> But that's just me being all existential and postmodern. Maybe this isn't nearly as good a concept as I thought it would be. Either way, it's out now.
> 
> That's all I've got for now. Thanks for reading. Share if you enjoyed. Always remember to stay in school.


End file.
